


What It Means To Love

by raendown



Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-21
Updated: 2017-07-21
Packaged: 2018-12-05 01:09:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11567172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raendown/pseuds/raendown
Summary: Kakashi and Sakura's son learns a little bit about what it means to love somebody, even when they're not at their best.





	What It Means To Love

Takashi’s mom was kind of famous for having a temper, and a destructive one at that. The whole village was familiar with just how loud she could be when riled. So it wasn’t really the volume of his mom’s voice that was bothering him right now so much as what she was saying.

She’d been yelling at his dad for what felt like forever and, like he always did when confronted with this kind of blunt accusation, Takashi’s dad had shut down and was not responding. The young boy wasn’t even in the room but he could picture the Rokudaime Hokage standing utterly still, hands deep in his pockets and both eyes half lidded in a misleading expression of detachment.  He could also picture his mother, Sakura, with her thunderous expression and her strong arms waving madly through the air while she continued to throw words like knives, seemingly uncaring of the wounds they inflicted. 

And the worst part was that Takashi knew it was all his own fault. His dad wasn’t to blame yet he’d said nothing in his own defense. Takashi wasn’t sure if it was because Kakashi always said he would back him in anything he did in life or if it was just because he didn’t appreciate the way he was being spoken to and refused to engage. Either way the thirteen year old recognized the very serious dilemma in front of him: to tell or not to tell. 

On the one hand, owning up to what he had done was the right thing to do and both of his parents had always taught him to do the right thing whenever possible. On the other hand he was  _terrified_. His mother would turn her anger to him and most smart shinobi tried to avoid that exact situation; it had spelled death for many people before him. He shuddered to think of what she would do to him upon finding out what he had done. More terrifying, however, was the thought of her finding out some day that he had allowed his dad to take the fall for him and that decided it. He would have to tell. 

Takashi gulped as he swung open the door to his room, feeling a little like he was marching to his death. He gathered every scrap of courage he had and placed one foot in front of the other, step by step, until he had reached the center of the storm that raged through their house.

Sakura looked as if she had run home straight from the hospital upon hearing the news. She was still wearing her Head Medic uniform and there was a small bloodstain on the hem, wrinkles on the arms, stress lines on her face. Across from her Kakashi looked as if he were pulling farther in to himself than Takashi had ever seen and it broke his heart to be a peripheral cause of that. He knew very well the hard life his dad had lived; he didn’t deserve any more unhappiness, no matter how fleeting. 

“-still a  _child_  Kakashi, how could you!? Do you not care about his well-being? His life? Do you want him to be like you so badly? How dare you!” 

“Mom?” 

Sakura’s voice cut off at his quiet, pathetic call. The quiet in the absence of her words was like a ringing in his ears and he trembled under the weight of it. Kakashi seemed to slowly rise from a stupor, his eyes sliding over to rest on his son with a flat, dead look to them. 

“Takashi,” Sakura grunted, “you can tell we’re in the middle of something. Now is not the time.”

“Mom, it’s important.”

He watched his mom lift a hand to rub the bridge of her nose. She sounded as if she were barely controlling herself as she asked, “What is it?” 

“It’s…you shouldn’t be mad at dad.” Sakura looked at him sharply and he rushed through the rest of his words, knowing if he faltered then he would lose his courage and not say them at all. “You should be mad at me. It wasn’t dad who signed the form, it was me. I forged his name.”  

He swallowed thickly, shaking and scared and refusing to cry as the ire built up again in Sakura’s face. Her fists clenched and un-clenched rhythmically.

“You forged his name?”

“Yes.”

“On a form stating that, in his opinion, your team was ready to take on a  _B-rank mission meant for seasoned chunin_?”

“…yes.”

He’d known that Naruto-sama had asked his dad to help oversee the missions being handed out, to help assess each team and assign them appropriately. He’d also known exactly which genin was carrying the assessments and where they were filed. It had been easy for someone in the know to switch one of them out so that his team was noted as being highly skilled, ready for advanced missions. 

It wasn’t the greatest plan he’d ever come up with, in hindsight, but it had seemed like a good idea at the time. 

Sakura had already looked ready to start spewing steam from her ears when he had come in to the room. Now she seemed about to breathe fire. The full weight of the wrongness of what he had done came crashing down on Takashi like a doton burying him in an avalanche. 

“Do you understand what could have happened!?” Sakura screeched. “Your team is  _not_  ready and there is a  _reason_  for those assessments! You could have died, Takashi! Your teammates could have died! Your jonin-sensei could have died trying to protect you! Do you want that on your conscience? Do you want your teammates to come home with scars and trauma? For every time you look at them to be reminded that it was your actions that led to those things? And all for what? To look cool!?”

Takashi was crying before she had gotten through her third sentence. 

“And that’s just the personal implications! You-you- _look at your father Hatake Takashi_. You look him in the eye and tell me what part of your genius plan seemed smart to you. To lay the blame for your stupidity at his feet.” 

Sakura railed and ranted and by the end both she and her child were weeping messes of emotion. Of fear and anger and relief - such  _strong_  relief that nothing bad had happened. That he was alive and whole and safe to do something just as stupid on another day. 

He hated to see his mother cry, to know that he had caused her pain, but Takashi stood still like the strong shinobi he wanted to be and let her storm wash over him. He had brought it on himself and he would take the consequences. 

(He would never  _never_  do something this stupid again)

When it was over Takashi had been grounded for a month, had his video game privileges revoked, and been warned of the overwhelming list of chores he would be sentenced to attending to around the house for the foreseeable future. All in all, he felt almost as if he had gotten off lightly considering how serious the consequences  _could_  have been. 

He shuffled back to his room when his mother stormed off to the forest behind their home to vent the rest of her emotions. He tried desperately to stem the flow of tears and nothing seemed to work until the door to his room creaked open to reveal his father standing there.

Kakashi looked nothing more than tired, exhausted, like shutting down had taken all of the energy from him and he wasn’t sure how to get it back. Takashi looked up at him helplessly, not knowing what to say. 

“That was very brave,” his dad told him quietly. “Very brave of you to tell the truth knowing what would happen if you did.” 

“I’m sorry, dad! I’m sorry!” Takashi burst in to tears all over again, burying his face in his hands. He felt like the scum of the earth. 

He was surprised to find arms winding around his shoulders, pulling him in to his father’s chest and letting him cry there like he had as a child with a scraped knee. Takashi sobbed, clinging to his dad’s shirt and burrowing in to his embrace. Nothing was safer than Kakashi’s arms and they had always held the power to make the world disappear no matter how old he got.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered again after a long time had passed, when his weeping had become a steady slow trickle of tears. He felt Kakashi pet his hair soothingly. 

“Yes, I know. And you should be.”

“Why didn’t you tell mom that it wasn’t you?” he asked. Incredibly, considering how little emotion he had seen in his father when he’d come in, Kakashi chuckled.

“Your mother has always been…spirited, I think I’ll call it. When she’s angry she’s not very willing to listen to reason. She knows that and she’s been trying to work on it for years. But this involved you and your safety. You are the single most precious thing in both of our lives. Loves makes us all irrational, but especially your mother. She needed to yell and scream. She needed to vent. I thought it would be best for her to get it out first, then when she had calmed down enough she might listen.” Kakashi pulled them apart a little to look in to his son’s eyes. “Better that she yells at me than you. I knew what her temper was like when I married her and I have accepted that part of her, ugly as it is.” 

Takashi puffed up automatically. “Mom’s not ugly!” 

“Her temper is,” Kakashi pointed out. “No one is perfect, Takashi. Every person you meet will have ugly parts but loving someone means that you accept their ugly parts as well as their beautiful ones. You don’t have to like it, only accept it. I love you very much but that doesn’t mean I have to like the fact that you are a giant squish-face knucklehead.”

“Daaaaaad!” Takashi scrunched up his nose. “I’m not five anymore! Quit calling me squish-face!”

“Never!” Kakashi turned his eyes up in a smile and even though he was still full of grief and terror and guilt and annoyance, Takashi smiled back, just a tiny bit happy.

“I love you too, dad,” he said. “And I’m really, really sorry.”

Kakashi’s eyes opened to give him a very long look. Takashi bore it in silence until finally his dad told him, “And I forgive you.”

And he felt like everything might be okay after all.

(When Sakura came home and he heard her whispering apologies to her husband over and over, Takashi kept his ear pressed to the wall and made himself listen to every single word. His dad was right. Sakura’s temper was an ugly thing but that didn’t make her less of a beautiful person. He could only hope to be more like her someday.) 

 


End file.
